Large enterprises throughout the world rely on mainframe computers running sophisticated Database Management Systems and applications to mange data critical to the survival and growth of their business. One such Database Management System is IMS. IMS is a Hierarchical Database Management System (HDBMS) developed by International Business Machines Corporation. IMS has wide spread usage in many large enterprises where high transaction volume, reliability, availability and scalability are of the utmost importance. IMS, therefore, is particularly relevant to the teachings contained herein where any disruption to processing may have catastrophic implications.
Accordingly, when any problem or disruption of IMS processing occurs, finding the cause and taking corrective action is typically a very high priority task within the enterprise. This error analysis phase frequently involves taking a console dump of the entire DBMS address space, which in the case of IMS is the IMS Control region address space, to diagnose the problem. This dump may contain the critical information that is desirable, or even essential, to resolving the problem at hand.
The IMS console dump is typically written to the SYS1.DUMP data set. The amount of data written to the SYS1.DUMP data set, representing information available for all IMS resources, may be very large. In these cases, IMS transaction processing and corresponding user response times may be substantially degraded for several minutes until the writing to SYS1.DUMP is complete. The overall performance of the operating system in which DBMS is executing may also be negatively impacted because of the extensive I/O operations involved in completing the dumping operation.
Furthermore, the space allocated to receive the console dump may be too small to receive all of the dumped memory. In this case, the console dump operation may fail to capture essential information within the partially recorded data necessitating a complete repeat of the dumping operation along with a repeat of the incumbent disruption to the IMS user.
Further still, a large console dump will also consume a vast quantity of disk storage. For many enterprises, disk storage is a scarce resource representing a significant portion of the Information Technology (IT) budget to install and manage. Network resources may also be negatively impacted in that the console dump is frequently transmitted to an off-site support center for analysis.
Accordingly, there is a great need to provide a more efficient and cost effective method for obtaining required information to facilitate failure analysis tasks related to real or perceived problems within the operation of a DBMS.